The most essential diplomatic instrument in the game will be treaties. In Particracy, a treaty is a mostly binding agreement between two or more nations to abide by certain rules. These treaties can be drafted by foreign ministers and need to be ratified by the national legislatures in order to come into effect. Each treaty is made up of one or more articles, and in this blog post I’ll describe what kind of articles will be available.

Diplomacy is the art of letting someone else have your way.Sir David Frost

I’ve grouped the treaty articles by common topics to make it easier to digest.

Political Articles

Resolution

The most basic article is a textual resolution, for which players can enter their own text. Such an article has no influence on game mechanics, it is purely there to support role-playing and cannot be enforced other than by goodwill of the players involved.

Legislative Variables

Treaties can be used to constrain legislative variables, for instance you could draft a treaty to forbid signatories from applying the death penalty. Nations can only ratify the treaty once their laws are already compliant, and will not be able to change their laws on the subject outside of the options permitted by the treaty. This kind of article also works for numeric law topics, so for instance a treaty could be made to constrain the corporate tax rate in a certain range.

Economic Articles

Free Trade

Free trade articles prohibit the signatories from imposing export or import tariffs on trade with one another. Initially this kind of article will apply to all trade, but this could later be expanded to support specific economic products.

Military Articles

Military Base

Military base treaties allow signatory nations to station military units on the listed territories of another signatory nation.

War

Signatory nations automatically declare ware against a specified other nation. This type of article can be used for a coalition of the willing kind of arrangement.

Peace

Signatory nations declare peace with one another. A treaty is the only way to achieve peace between nations that are at war, because it is by definition a bilateral agreement (whereas declaring war can be done unilaterally). Nations can unilaterally choose to declare a cease-fire but that is not the same as lasting peace and offers no guarantees for continuity.

Alliance

The nations that ratify this treaty pledge to automatically declare war whenever war has been declared one of the other signatories.

Territory Transfer

Territory transfers can be made part of a treaty. While not required, this would usually be part of a peace deal.

Supranational Articles

Founding

Supranational governments are organizations that have nations as their members. This structure allows players to define their own versions of the United Nations or European Union, for instance. Signatories automatically become members of the organization.

Founding Body

Supranational governments can operate different bodies, for instance consider the European Commission or the UN’s Security Council or General Assembly. This bit hasn’t been quite fleshed out yet but I intend to offer diverse options.

Accession

Signatories to this treaty will become members of the specified supranational government.

Constraining Articles

Restriction

This article restricts ratification to the listed nations. This kind of article is needed if you want to set up a deal between a limited set of partner nations.

Requirement

This article imposes an extra condition for the treaty to come into effect only when it is ratified by specific nations.

Membership

This article limits ratification of the treaty to active members of a specified supranational government.